Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History ed. by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi (review)

Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History comes in as a necessary intervention. Within the field of history of emotions, Spanish literature and culture are objects of study clearly underrepresented; even more, when we talk about the twentieth century—a historical period not very favored by this field either. The book encompasses fifteen chapters ordered chronologically according to the period treated, an introduction and a foreword by Antonio Muñoz Molina.

The first chapters explore some of the dichotomies that the current study of emotions seeks to dismantle. Mónica Bolufer structures her study of reason and sentiment in eighteenth century Spain around three questions that pertain to the interconnections between literature, painting and history. The last one of these questions is particularly ambitious: How did the affective models proposed by sentimental literature influence the ways in which people assigned meaning to their feelings and relations? (25) Bolufer asserts that, "with some peculiarities and a degree of time lag, the Spanish culture of sensibility shares with its European counterparts some fundamental features that differentiate it from the regime of Romantic sensibility" (26). She identifies a change of paradigm in the genre's conventions for auto-narrative.

Wadda Ríos-Font transitions to the exploration of another type of historical discontinuity studying the discursive production of Ramón Power y Giralt, who was an envoy in the Cortes de Cadiz' sessions. She traces the meaning of "country," "fatherland," and "nation" ["pais," "patria," and "nación"] as the terms unfold in the arena of diplomacy. This allows her to present how colonies' self-conception went from an effort to be part of Europe to more modest aims. The compelling thesis of this article is that "out of the collapse of his patriotic discourse in the face of the fatherland's repudiation there emerges a new object for a love that is neither patriotic nor exactly nationalistic, but aroused by the land itself" (52). Next, Pura Fernández' article introduces two paradigms of reading that sought to inspire horror. The chapter successfully opens with two royal examples—a fictional and a non-fictional—that mirror each other. Fernández argues that Galería fúnebre (1831) by Agústin Pérez Zaragoza acts as homeopathic doses of horror that going beyond delightfulness enhance citizen's ability to cope with the "real" horror of the period.

Linking the field of history of science and history of emotion, Rebecca Hairdt carries on a wonderful analysis of the discursive space of sympathy in secular and religious conceptions of public health and hygiene. It is clear in her study that two opposite mental frameworks fight over the true notion of sympathy. Charnon Deutsch studies in the following chapter the affective economy of the bogeymen informing nineteenth century popular fiction. She specifically seeks to give an account of the transmission of hate in European literature. Her study brings to the fore the importance of studying the representations of despised groups collectively. Rafael Huertas' article acts as a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth century topics. Huertas studies the sense of paratopia perceived in the writings authored by patients interned in the former mental asylum of Leganés. Notions of self-representation and competing paradigms in political and public health discourses structure the first part of the book. The reader benefits from the proposed transitions between chapters; not only the chapters resonate with each other, but arguably, one can engage the emotions one by one.

The book jumps fully into the twentieth century with an analysis of affective practices inaugurated in cinemas. For Juli Highfill the cinema during the 1920s opened the possibility of virtual and actual experiences coexisting. The study is primarily a descriptive account of this new sensorium and the affective content of cinematic experience during the 1920's. The next chapter on emotional norms during Republican Spain argues many Republican newspapers...